Favorite Books of 2018

24 Jan 2019

29 books and about 10,000 pages.
Once again
I fell short of my target
of reading a book every week,
but it’s almost identical to
last year’s reading stats.
Here’s some of my favorite books of the year.

Non-fiction

Anyone who thinks,
“I don’t have the talent to learn…”
ought to read this book
and understand the concept of the growth mindset.
It shows the impact
of treating your skills
as something you can develop
rather than something you’re born with.

This was an important read for me this year.
It’s a great, short read on mentoring,
consisting of essays
from Harvard Business Review.
It highlighted things I could do
to get more out of mentors,
and
what I’ve been doing wrong
when mentoring others.

A few months ago,
I attended
Sandi Metz’s fantastic Object Oriented Design course,
which took us through
the topics covered in this book.
On the surface,
the book is about writing a program
to print a silly song.
But the amount of complexity
that it unearths in such a simple problem
is astounding.
It takes you through a refactoring journey,
explaining every step along the way,
almost as if you’re pairing with the authors.

It’s great for every experience level.
For beginners,
it will teach you about refactoring,
testing
and writing great code.
And for more experienced folks,
it will expose the bad habits
you’ve picked up over the years.

Fiction

This was an incredible book.
I was looking for a good epic fantasy series
after finishing
The Wheel of Time series.
I raced through the 1200+ pages,
finishing the final 400 pages
in a single sitting.
I’m constantly amazed by
the many different worlds and magic systems
that Sanderson has created.
Highly recommended for fans of epic fantasy,
especially Wheel of Time fans.

It’s an unconventional detective story,
because it starts by telling us
who committed the crime.
The rest of the book is about
the suspect covering up their tracks.
Yet it manages to lull you
into thinking where the story is going
before throwing up unexpected plot twists.
The characters were one-dimensional,
but it makes up for it
with a gripping storyline,
and almost makes you root for the suspect.

The Martian
is one of my favorite sci-fi novels,
so I’ve been excited about this second book by Andy Weir.
It’s not at the same level as The Martian,
but has elements I liked in that one:
the science it touches upon is very plausible,
and the plot maintains a frenetic page.
The setting has moved from Mars
to a human colony on the Moon,
and the protagonist is basically
a female version of the one from The Martian -
a resourceful, wisecracking character
in trouble far away from Earth.

This felt a bit different
from the original trilogy -
parts of it feel like a suspense novel
as much as a fantasy one.
It also revealed a lot more
about the Mistborn world’s connection
to the rest of the Cosmere Universe -
the shared universe
in which all of Sanderson’s worlds exist.

2019

Almost every year,
I give myself a target
to finish 52 books,
ie. a book every week.
For 2019,
I’m trying a less ambitious
target of 30.
I think
this will also be the year
I switch to reading ebooks
more that printed books.
I finally got myself
a Kindle Oasis.
That should make it easier
to read while traveling.

Links

Hi, I’m Nithin Bekal.
I work at Shopify in Ottawa, Canada.
Previously, co-founder of
CrowdStudio.in and
WowMakers.
Ruby is my preferred programming language,
and the topic of most of my articles here,
but I'm also a big fan of Elixir.
Tweet to me at @nithinbekal.